Post by Jennifer Tomkins
Kim Foxx in Chicago, Carlos Garcia in Phoenix, and now Chesa Boudin in San Francisco: all three are examples of people of color elected as District Attorney. Their elections signal the growing awareness of the importance of DAs and city councils to a key part of the progressive agenda: reforming the current “criminal injustice system.” It’s also a direct result of the surge in progressive organizing and in funding from folks like Airlift, Way to Win and others since the 2016 election. Now that they’ve been elected by the people, we, the people, have to ensure they can do their jobs.
Criminal “injustice” and the road to progressive DAs
One of the starkest statistics reflective of this injustice is the fact that while the US population is just 4.4 percent of the global population, the US prison population is a shocking 22% of those incarcerated worldwide. The Pew Research Center reported that in 2017 the rate of incarceration for African Americans was nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites. Meanwhile the fastest growing demographic of those in prison is Black women. As the movie 13th argues, our prison system can be seen as an extension of slavery by other means.
It used to be that DA races happened under the radar and police unions played a prominent role in their election. In the past few years, that began to change in response to growing anger over police violence amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, by the bi-partisan awareness of the need for reform and from progressive political funders investing in down ballot races, such as DAs and city councils.
But, as Foxx pointed out to an audience of progressive women at the recent conference of Women Donors Network in Chicago, getting elected is only the first, and possibly the easiest part. Once elected, these progressive DAs and local legislators face enormous pressure from the “establishment” to “conform” rather than to fulfill their election pledges.
Foxx becomes the new face of justice
Foxx is a savvy, elegant, strong and articulate African American woman who has risen to her current position from the Chicago projects. As she says, she looks like 85% of the people that come through her office. She is determined to continue the policy disruption she has begun, but she is also clear what she needs from those who elected her: she needs them to have her back.
Since being elected Cook County DA, Foxx has nevertheless changed the gender of leadership in her office, increasing women in leadership positions from 25% to 58%; she vacated 80 convictions because of police misconduct and she is in the process of vacating 10,000 more for marijuana possession.
“My job is not to be an extension of the police,” she says. Yet, that is precisely what most DAs have been and it’s how the Chicago police force would like it to continue being. She has been physically threatened by the Fraternal Order of Police and white nationalists who held a rally outside her office and widely criticized for being “soft on crime.”
Justice spreads from the Midwest to the West
On the west coast, newly elected DA Boudin, a former defense attorney, has received the same kind of opposition from the police as Foxx. San Francisco Police Officers Association called Boudin the “#1 choice of criminals and gang members” in the more than $600,000 worth of attack ads it ran against Boudin.
He too has an agenda that centers on the elimination of racist practices. In particular, he plans to target “gang enhancements” (the practice of increasing sentences for crimes in any way associated with gang activities) that affect predominantly people of color and that he views as explicitly racist. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle interview, he explained, “In the cases where we see serious conduct, we can already impose serious punishments without using racially motivated gang enhancements.”
If Boudin’s and Foxx’s elections are a reaction to criminal injustice, so too was that of Carlos Garcia to Phoenix City Council in March this year. A recent article in Politico Magazine by Fernanda Santos explores in depth how Garcia’s election and that of other Hispanics to local office throughout Arizona is mainly thanks to their activist organizing and training, largely in opposition to criminal injustice.
Many organizations, not the Democratic Party, powered activists like Garcia to victory, including Mi Familia Vota, LUCHA (an Airlift funding recipient) and Mijente. As for the reason they transitioned to political office from activism, Garcia explained that after five of his siblings were deported, “I got left with no options. And that’s what has pushed someone like me to actually run for office.” Of their new-found strategy of seeking elected office, Garcia says “brown people are coming out, and now we have the numbers and the organization in place to be able to turn the tables in our favor exactly because we have a seat at the table.”
But, like Foxx and Boudin, Garcia and his cohort are only too aware of the effort it will take to implement the policies on which they ran. As Garcia says, it’s a “very lonely world of running for office and governing.” That’s why it’s so important that we in the progressive funding space need to have all their backs. It’s not just about getting them elected, it’s also about turning out for them as they face both political opposition and physical threats.
Now That We Elected Them, It's Time To Have Their Backs